An und für sich in 2013: A Year in Review

Friday, December 13, 2013 — Adam Kotsko

The year is not yet over, but we can add new notable posts that are written after this date. The past year was not as exciting as 2012, when (to speak only of the biggest highlight) Brandy dropped a series of bombs on the theology blogging world after AAR. (Brandy has since moved on to the greener pastures of Women in Theology, where she’s continued to produce ground-breaking work that deeply challenges the theological academy.)

Stephen Keating joined us this spring, starting off with a bang as his post The Neoliberal Church ruffled many emerging feathers. This year also marked an uptick in participation by Beatrice Marovich and Steven Shakespeare. Steven’s posts covered radical theology, the smugness of many white male theologians (a favorite topic here), and academic labor politics. Beatrice’s contributions frequently used news events, blog posts, and magazine articles as a jumping-off point for unique reflections, including one on Barbie as martyr and another on the disturbing malleability of Christianity. Bruce Rosenstock shared a couple of pieces with us as well, on snakes and vialism. During the year, we also enjoyed a single post by Basit Iqbal — hopefully he will return to us at some point.

As for me, while I don’t have the numbers to back this up, I would guess that this year marked a low point in my blogging output. A number of factors contributed to this, but overall I am just becoming more busy and am more concerned to devote my energy to my formal writing than to blogging (though it’s probably not a trade-off). It’s probably also the case that my hyper-active Twitter output — including this world-famous viral tweet — cut into my blogging, as I used up ideas in Twitter rants that would have been better developed as posts. Nevertheless, a small amount of blogging for me is a huge amount for many, so here are a few that captured people’s attention:

Each year I hope that our blogging will be less controversy-driven, and it does appear that our “engagement” with Radical Orthodoxy and OOO has more or less fizzled out (my post on OOO was driven more by my reading of Heidegger than by any ongoing conversation with OOOians). We butted heads with the Emergent types and Peter Rollins — though most of that activity seems to be centered on Twitter — as well as with supporters of Creston Davis’s incredibly misguided attempt to start a new graduate school, though only in an episodic way. Unfortunately, though, it seems that for some readers, controversy is all we do. I imagine that for such people, one post that they view as overly critical is enough to define us as “haters,” regardless of all the other things we do. And so I can only say: so it goes. Whatever others may say, I’m proud of what we’ve built together and thank the many people whose contributions have made AUFS one of the most productive, insightful, and unpredictable blogs out there.

8 Responses to “An und für sich in 2013: A Year in Review”

I think it has been a good year and the diversity is impressive. Brandy’s contributions were incredible amongst others. I wish I could’ve posted more this fall but my post-doc is really consuming my life along with trying to publish and present at conferences. I hope to come back in 2014 with some more contributions once things settle down.

Sorry I have been kind of absent, though I lurk on here. The demands of my first year in a new church and a new baby in the past year (and the new book, etc.) have pushed blogging to my margins a bit. I’ll post another sermon soon. I’ll echo, too, that I love reading the blog and I also deeply appreciate Brandy and Beatrice’s contributions.

I should, I suppose, formally apologize for how lackluster that Stoner discussion was. Fortunately, enduring shame is celebrated, maybe unseemly so, at my new haunt. I will, however, continue to keep a mailing address here, though. Soon enough I will have a Year in Reading post up here.

I think the exchange about the new graduate school was pretty epic and timely. I still can’t help but check out their page once in a while to see what other innovative mind-blowingly revolutionary ideas they are cooking up these days. Apparently, they recently came up with this thing called an “online course”…

If, as seems likely, the Exciting New Grad School turns out to be a total flop, I don’t think people will say, “Wow, looks like those AUFS guys were right!” To the people who want to believe, we’ll still be intolerable assholes.

I am just now catching up on all the blog reading I missed in December (I hibernated, basically…though it appears that the weather *now* calls for hibernation more than last month did, but alas…), and just saw this little shout-out and such, and just wanted to say thanks! :) Also, thanks for this post–it’s helpful to have an easy to access list of some links that I may have missed!